All of nazgulnarsil's Comments + Replies

mining was unprofitable for a long while until just recently with the price recovery. mining now is worth it for the free heating.

as opposed to black fish.

You can be gentle about DH7 by attributing the improved argument to someone with high status. This is my typical strategy and seems to work well. It's a double whammy because you're implicitly associating them with someone of high status e.g. "it's funny you say that, it's very similar to an argument by ". I'm NOT saying that you actually have to know a bunch of famous arguments offhand, the better argument can be attributed fallaciously to anyone who has spoken on a topic and can have little to do with the person's original argument. Few notice and you have the out of being mistaken even if they do.

JoshuaZ290

That is a fascinating border case between Dark Arts and rational discussion.

Satisficing seems a great way to describe the behavior of maximizers with multiple-term utility functions and an ordinal ranking of preference satisfaction i.e. humans. This sounds like it should have some fairly serious implications.

I think I can summarize hedonomics right here: Most people spend too much time optimizing for the acquisition of more objects and not enough optimizing their use of objects they already have (where objects can be anything we want not just physical items).

ex: "If only I was better looking!"

economics: acquire more of the properties that make you attractive to other people

hedonomics: are you maximizing your looks given your current resources?

I think the distinction relies on a naive understanding of economics, but it is nonetheless a good heuristic in general to ask that sort of question.

The things that increase testosterone serum levels are things you should be doing anyway.

  1. ensure you're getting good quality sleep (poor quality sleep responsible for up to a 40% drop)
  2. ensure that your diet includes enough fresh vegetables that you're getting RDAs of zinc, magnesium, and b-vitamins.
  3. engage in physical activity, especially those that engage the largest muscle groups.
  4. stop eating low fat foods. the majority of people eating low fat food make up for the lack of calories with more sugary foods. whole milk, eggs, full fat cottage cheese, nut
... (read more)

I do not plan to supplement my natural levels but I do intend to use supllemental test to stay at my baseline as the level naturally drops off with aging.

I favor a diaspora cev. Why compromise between wildly divergent CEV's of subsets if you don't actually have to? In more concrete terms, I'm in favor of holodecking psychopaths.

Using technical definitions and ignoring folk meanings is something I've been noticing more in myself and others lately. Until I started making the distinction when listening to others I never realized how painfully bad it must sound when I do it.

After further investigation I retract the "much worse" comment. It is a little more precise than I previously thought.

the poverty threshold is a much worse metric than looking directly at various parameters for living standards.

2[anonymous]
I agree, but poverty and efforts for its alleviation aren't really about material concerns. Everyone having say food, shelter from the elements and basic healthcare can be made to work. But poverty as in relative poverty is unavoidable.
3JoshuaZ
Can you expand on this? The poverty threshold in the US is designed to incorporate parameters for living standards regarding food and other essentials. How would you do things differently? It does have some problems certainly, like not taking into account differing costs of living in different locations, but as a rough measure for this purpose it seems fine.

this might just be the single greatest comment I've seen on LW.

I say that I hang out with people who are "into hardcore rationality" immediately followed up with "studying reasoning, that sort of thing." I think the nerdishness sound of that balances it out slightly.

I cut people making decisions before google a lot more slack. If you make a bad a decision because of a lack of info that was on the first page of a google search on the topic I'm not really worried about your shitty outcomes.

[anonymous]360

If by "I don't know why people care so much" you mean "I don't know why rationalists care that Steve Jobs was killed by dysrationalia", I think the answer is obvious. We live in a terrifyingly insane world, where woo science can claim a genius who should have known better. This is worth regretting.

If he was that bothered by the prospect of dying enough he would have made a more thorough investigation.

I don't think that is true. People aren't automatically rational, and we definitely aren't rational economic agents.

Steve Jobs' death ... (read more)

If your system is 99% 'good' you actually CAN then nudge your behavior via slight modifications. For example floss no longer goes in the bathroom, it stays next to my computer where I see it.

pocket discipline? you mean everyone doesn't do this?! there are people walking around right now with their possessions in random pockets and they themselves might not know what pocket an item is in until they check? MADNESS. brb, accosting strangers.

0Armok_GoB
Upvoted because it sounds like excellent rejection-therapy like training! More random variations on the theme "accost strangers and try to convince them to live their lives differently"? Edit: in before "not posting a lose sentence fragment followed by a question mark". :p

When trying to convince someone of something that is weird we use smaller inference jumps in order to make our argument more watertight. This is perceived as condescension. You aren't going to convince anyone of something weird in a single conversation anyway. Use normal inference jumps and if the topic comes up multiple times you'll eventually have the opportunity to plug any gaps. Also keep in mind that normal people don't require near as high a standard of proof in the first place.

People's subjective experience of how attractive someone is is heavily influenced by framing. I can't find the relevant study but basically people responded with better ratings when someone was surrounded by less attractive people than when someone was surrounded by people who were around the same or more attractive. Conclusion? The same as Mises: preference rankings are ordinal, not cardinal. The frame of hotornot is looking at a very large group, so all but the most attractive in the set will rank slightly worse than they otherwise would have (real l... (read more)

7Prismattic
Addtionally, assessments of physical attractiveness are also influenced by assessments of other traits. Suppose you meet someone you think is a 10, but you discover that you cringe every time they open their mouth (to disambiguate, this a reference to the content of their speech, not their dentistry). Not only are you probably not going to want to be with that person, but your physical assessment is going to change. I don't mean they will suddenly seem ugly, but probably they'll be a 7 or 8, and you won't be able to understand how you ever thought they were a 10 in the first place.

I expect radical extension on my natural lifespan given that even currently: "A second, larger study of men in their 70s found that those who avoided smoking, obesity, inactivity, diabetes and high blood pressure greatly improved their chances of living into their 90s. In fact, they had a 54 percent chance of living that long."

and I have several decades of life expectancy continuing to improve just from mundane medical research.

I would be shocked at no brain uploads by 2085.

3jefftk
How much can you choose to not have high blood pressure? How much is genetic? How much depends on our actions but not in a way we understand yet?

Nobody engages the topic seriously besides perhaps a handful of bloggers on the internet. To talk about the topic intelligently requires rare traits. An extremely broad swath of knowledge about econ and history, and the ability to not be mind-killed by politics chief among them.

With regard to great achievements enable bad government, yes you find strains of this thought in most of the "cyclical" types of historical analysis, most famous being Spengler.

3[anonymous]
It is a ridiculous world we live in.

I was under the impression that an IQ of 145 puts one in the 99.75% percentile but I never investigated too closely. Some stats:

" rarity on a 15 SD (e.g. Wechsler) and 16 SD (e.g. Stanford-Binet) scale: 145 99.8650032777% 1 in 741

99.7542037453% 1 in 407

1David Althaus
Hm, I've trusted Steve Hsu on this. I don't know if they only accept people in the 99,9th percentile or if folks in the 99,865th meet the criteria, too. I guess it doesn't matter too much. EDIT: And I've changed the title again. Now it should be sufficiently vague.

I don't remember the exact quote or source, but I once read something along the lines of "humans don't prove anything, we just decide which side of the argument we will hold to a higher standard of proof."

0Raw_Power
Motivated Continuing and Motivated Stopping? But accusing someone of that would be incurring in the Genetic Fallacy...

No matter how well you atomize a proof there remains inferential gaps that gets filled by humans agreeing that something is obvious. Some are considered axiomatic, many aren't.

0Raw_Power
... That's basically what many theists object to Yudkowsky's sequences. "There are inferential gaps".

the more you investigate the foundations of mathematics the more miraculous "obvious" inference jumps will become.

1Raw_Power
Really? How so?

this is somewhat circular. It works for the example but not knowing how similar two situations have to be before similar decisions produce similar utility is part of the problem.

is there no software that can help speed along video transcription?

I'm skeptical because of the huge differences in male and female dominant strategies for mating*. I think poly can work, but that a lot of people who consider themselves poly just haven't run into a highly frictional situation yet or have put their fingers in their ear and are shouting "lalalala".

*I should note that I'm also extremely skeptical of monogamy. The situation that makes men and women happiest seems to involve some (sometimes a lot) of unhappiness in their partners.

starting strength.

drink milk.

by the time you stop getting gains through this method you will be in amazing shape.

1Alex Flint
Not sure I understand "starting strength". Do you mean that when starting strength training one should just drink milk?
0[anonymous]
Drink milk? Do you mean drink milk and also lift heavy shit and put it down again in the same place lots of times?

I rarely if ever downvote someone's initial post on a conversation branch, even if poorly formed. I'll ask them to clarify their position and if they have a massive rationality failure in their response to this THEN I downvote.

I really like the phrase "More is Possible."

3atucker
I think it came to LW through this.

lists of friendliness conditions are known to be stupid. this is an obvious failure mode.

I start attendance there this semester as well. Meet in the CS club room initially then figure out something from there?

As for meetups in the area you know about the mountain view meetup 15 minutes away yes?

0MatthewBaker
Sounds like a plan, and no I don't think ive seen a mountain view meetup on here in a while.

I'm not saying buffet isn't a good investor. Just that he is far less good than the popular narrative. Investor success follows a pareto distribution. There's always going to be someone like Buffet.

If I start flipping a coin and half the population guesses heads and half tails and I eliminate the half that guesses wrong, I will eventually wind up with one person with an unprecedented prediction streak.

5orthonormal
Yes, but Buffett continued his success for a long time after he'd already been publicly noticed. If you start with a million people, it shouldn't surprise you if someone gets 20 heads in a row- but if they get 30, you need to look for other hypotheses.

There are 2 such schools in San Jose. Anyone else in the area interested?

0MatthewBaker
Possibly, we will discuss this when we meetup.

so half of matt experiences bajillions of years of post singularity awesomeness but half of him experiences only being plucked from normal experience, then the letter, then death? that sounds lie it is reducing your own utility.

1Manfred
The trick is to evaluate the future with your current utility, not by the utility of future yous. Similarly, don't wirehead or commit suicide expecting to live "quantumly." EDIT: Actually this might be the wrong trick depending on what you meant. You might have to use the trick of representing multiple instances of a person as frequencies (i.e. not normalized until the end).
5AlexMennen
The "half" that gets the awesomeness is by far the larger half. I do feel that I would rather not be put in the situation I described, but I noticed that this could be interpreted as inconsistent with my expressed desire to know that I'm about to die conditional on it being true.
3Armok_GoB
Only if you make all sorts of unwaranted assumptions about several things.
-2timtyler
My response from last month is here.

"How many countries in the Euro zone will default on bonds in 2011?” or “Will Southern Sudan become an independent country in 2011?”

It's hard to make predictions about politics because the decision makers have perverse/unknown sets of incentives. In contrast, it's much easier to make guesses with reasonable error bars when the decision maker is spending his/her own money.

it's a parody based upon the incongruous juxtaposition that you yourself enumerate.

had to click away after the rap started. why do people still think that making rap videos about things white people like is funny? it was slightly funny in the 90's.

4Raw_Power
Expecting rap music to "belong" to black people and other uses of it to be nothing but parody is absurd, insulting and just plain ethnocentric. I'll have you know that people of all "races" and venues in life rap. For this video's purpose, Rap was especially well-suited because it is a genre that favour boastfulness and ridiculing of the opponents: it's something poets and bards have been doing for millenia, because back then there was nothing as memetic as a good satyre that rhymed: it's easy to remember and fun to repeat (as an Arab, I could recite to you some VIIth century verses that would make current rappers take notes... though I don't need to go that far in space-time: some sonnets from Quevedo or Voltaire should do the trick just as well). Euologies are also great for repeating within one's own group, reinforcing the collective ego, and for throwing at the opponents in public. Rap is simply the XXth century expression of that old, non-lyrical poetry (indeed, little rap is dedicated to musing on the wonders of the world or otherwise emoting or contemplating). So, this video is about New Atheists being obnoxious about saying "we are awesome, you suck, you should join us". I can't possibly imagine a better way of doing it than rap. And, obviously, this has nothing to do with "stuff white people like": one of the things that make it funny is that it features stuffy, dignified, prestigious old scholars doing the sort of status signalling that is so over-the-top you only expect it from people with extremely low status (again, not necessarily black by any means, you should listen to German or Korean rap sometime). You'd expect them to Counter-Signal by being all polite and nice, and then you start to wonder if they aren't counter-counter signalling and being Politeness Hipsters ("we're so high status we don't need to be boastful but we're doing it anyway because we know you couldn't possibly confuse us with the low-status boasters: we have the ego, we have the s
3DanPeverley
I thought of it was hilarious. The dissonance between the two parts caused the humor for me. Then again, I wasn't really looking at this sort of thing in the nineties, so maybe I haven't had a chance for my joviality to mature sufficiently.

"I think that the former quote captures more of what is going on. A community is being created in which cryonics isn't as weird, removing previous barriers without implicating rationality directly."

Very much so. People don't actually believe in the future.

8advancedatheist
Unfortunately that has an element of truth in it. Cryonics now has a reputation has a paleo-future fad from the 1960's, along with visions of space colonization, the postindustrial leisure society and the like. Many of the articles about Robert Ettinger's recent suspension present that as a subtext in describing his career. For example. the Washington Post obit says: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/from-phyics-teacher-to-founder-of-the-cryonics-movement/2011/07/24/gIQAupuIXI_story.html With the implication that in our disillusioned era, Ettinger sounds like a crank and a fool.

this seems very difficult if you aren't a member of a protected class. can a young white healthy male freeload easily?

3NancyLebovitz
I don't know about race, but I did read a piece by a young man who viewed homelessness as a sort of urban camping. He didn't use drugs and he didn't beg-- he found enough odd jobs.

Land is only a problem because of the dept of education. Competition wouldn't be nearly so fierce if there wasn't a monopoly on good schooling. Look at a heat map of property values. They are sharply discontinuous around school district borders.

1jhuffman
How does one school district with good schools prevent its neighbor districts from also having good schools? There are certainly plenty of examples of contiguous districts with good schools.

thanks, inverted and resized it for wallpaper because I hate white backgrounds. Link if anyone wants it.

http://i.imgur.com/ja7yQ.png

Money spent on mind uploading is a better defense against asteroids than asteroid detection. At least for me.

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